Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

The conversation flows easily, and the first fifteen minutes are full of all sorts of minutiae. Then, in response to a question about how she arrived at the idea for the movie, Sarah looks down, exhales, and says, “Well, it was supposed to be a documentary.”

At what she assumes is a joke, Edie laughs, but the glance passed between Kristi and Ben gives the lie to that. She says, “Wait—”

Sarah takes a sip from her water. “I’d known Isabelle since NYU,” she says, referring to Isabelle Router, who plays the ill-fated Isabelle Price. “She was from Huguenot, which was where I’d done my first two years of undergrad. We kind of bonded over that. She knew all about the area, these crazy stories. I was never sure if she was making them up, but any time I went to the trouble of fact-checking them, they turned out to be true. Or true enough. That’s why she was at school, for a degree in Cultural Anthropology. She wanted to study the folklore of the Hudson Valley.

“Anyway, we kept in touch after we graduated. I landed a position working for Larry Fessenden, Glass Eye Pix. Isabelle went to Albany for her doctorate. There was this piece of local history Isabelle wanted to include in her dissertation. She’d heard it from her uncle, who’d been a state trooper stationed in Highland when she was growing up. Sometime around 1969 or ’70, a train had made an unscheduled stop just north of Huguenot. This was when there was a rail line running up the Svartkil Valley. Even then, the trains were on their way out, but one still pulled into the station in downtown Huguenot twice a day. This was the night train, on its way north to Wiltwyck. It wasn’t very long, half a dozen cars. About five minutes after it left town, the train slowed, and came to a halt next to an old cement mine. A couple of men were waiting there, dressed in heavy coats and hats because of the chill. (It was only mid-October, but there’d been a cold snap that week. Funny, the details you remember.) No less than five passengers said they witnessed a woman being led off the very last car on the train by one of the conductors and another woman wearing a Catholic nun’s veil. None of the passengers got a good look at the woman between the conductor and the nun. All of them agreed that she had long black hair and that a man’s overcoat was draped across her shoulders. Other than that, their stories varied: one said that she had been bound in a straightjacket under the coat; another that she’d been wearing a white dress; a third that she’d been in a nightgown and barefoot. The woman didn’t struggle, didn’t appear to notice the men there for her at all. They took her from the conductor and the nun and, guiding her by the elbows, steered her toward the mine opening. Before anyone could see anything more, the train lurched forward.

“I suppose that might’ve been all, except one of the passengers was so bothered by what she’d seen that she called the police the minute she walked in her front door. The cops in Huguenot didn’t take her seriously, told her it was probably nothing, the engineer doing someone a favor. This was not good enough for our concerned citizen, who went on to dial the state police, next. Their dispatcher said they’d send someone out to have a look. Isabelle’s uncle—what was his name? John? Edward?”

“Richard,” Kristi Nightingale says. She is not looking at Sarah.

“Right, Richard, Uncle Rich,” Sarah says. “He was the one they sent. It was pretty late by the time he reached the old access road that led to the mine. He told Isabelle he didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t a pair of fresh corpses. He stumbled onto the men ten feet inside the mine entrance. One had been driven forward into the wall with such force his face was unrecognizable. The other had been torn open.”

“Wait,” Edie says, “wait a minute. This is real? I mean, this actually took place?”

Sarah nods. “You can check the papers. It was front page news for the Wiltwyck Daily Freeman and the Poughkeepsie Journal for days. Even the Times wrote a piece on it: ‘Sleepy College Town Rocked by Savage Killings.’”

“Well, what happened?”

“Nobody knew,” Sarah says. “The whole thing was very strange. Apparently, the dead men were the same guys who had met the woman from the train. It turned out they were brothers who came from somewhere down in Brooklyn—Greenpoint, maybe. I can’t remember their name, something Polish. Neither of their families could say what they were doing upstate, much less why they’d been waiting at the mine. Nor was there any trace of the conductor or the nun. All of the convents within a three hour radius could account for their residents’ whereabouts. The conductor who had been working that section of the train was a new guy who didn’t return the next day, and whose hiring information turned out to be fake. Of the mysterious woman, there was no trace. The police searched the mine, the surrounding woods, knocked on the doors of the nearest houses, but came up empty-handed.

“There were all kinds of theories floating around. The most popular one involved organized crime. There used to be a lot of Mafia activity in the Hudson Valley. They had their fingers in the locale sanitation businesses. Great way to dispose of your rivals, right? The story was, they also used some of the old mines and caves for the same purpose. In this version of events, the woman had been brought to the mine to disappear into it. Whoever she was, she or someone close to her was guilty of a particularly grievous trespass, and this was the punishment.

“But then what? How had she turned the tables on her captors and killed them? Not to mention, in such an… extravagantly violent manner. You could imagine adrenaline allowing her to overpower one of the men, seize his gun and shoot him and his partner before they had the chance to react. Crushing a man’s skull against a rock wall, cracking his friend’s chest open, were harder to believe. Plus, neither one showed evidence of having been armed.

“Maybe the woman hadn’t been there to be murdered; maybe she was there to be traded. She’d been kidnapped, and the mine was the place her abductors had selected to return her to whoever was going to pay her ransom. Or she was a high-class prostitute, being transferred from one brothel to another. Either way, the scheduled meeting went pear-shaped and the men died. It didn’t explain why they had done so in such a fashion, but the cops liked it better, it felt more probable to them.

“There were other, wilder explanations offered, too. The dead guys were Polish. This was the end of the sixties, the Cold War was in full swing, and Poland was slotted into the Eastern Bloc. Were the brothers foreign agents? Was the woman a fellow spy who had failed in her duties? Had she been sent here to be liquidated? Then rescued by other spies? Or were the brothers working for the US Government, and the woman a captured spy who had to vanish? These weren’t the craziest scenarios, either. Rosemary’s Baby was pretty big at this time, which may explain why some people picked up on the detail of the nun who stepped off the train. Could it be that the woman had been carrying the spawn of the Satan, or otherwise involved in diabolical activities? It would account for the savagery of the brothers’ deaths—the Devil and his followers are pretty ferocious—if not for what the men had been doing at the mine in the first place. It’s been a while since the Catholic Church sanctioned anyone’s murder.

“In the end, the investigation dead-ended. Officially, it was left open, but in the absence of any credible leads, the cops turned their attention elsewhere.”

Sarah drinks more water. “Within a year or two, the local kids were telling stories about the woman in the mine. Some of them portrayed her as criminally insane, delivered to the place to be kept in a secret cell constructed for the sole purpose of confining her. Other accounts made her a witch, dropped at the mine for essentially the same purpose, imprisonment. Whether she was natural or supernatural, the woman escaped her bonds, slaughtered her jailors, and was now on the loose, ready to abduct any child careless enough to allow her too close. A few years later, when The Exorcist was released, the narrative adapted itself to the film, and the woman became demonically possessed, transported upstate for an exorcism, which obviously had failed. It was one of the peculiarities of the story, the way it shaped itself to the current cultural landscape. The woman morphed into a teen with dangerous psychic abilities, an alien masquerading as a human, even a vampire. For older kids, venturing into the mine, especially at night, and especially at Halloween, became a rite of passage. After the railroad stopped running in the seventies, high school and college kids would drive to the access road and hike to the entrance to build bonfires and drink.